Maker

A forward thinking man once said “just keep walking”
but didn’t like to repeat himself as he trailed off
unsteadily, feet looking for something new, another route
that hindsight shows, replacing a memory worth giving up.

In the pieces of sunlight that add up a morning the barely dead
don’t grieve as much as the ball of man whose night was a floor,
the bottomed out, beer-stained, disdainfully scuffed linoleum
a cold war veteran: a night that could’ve been avoided,
a cold night on a whore.

This is the way the hallway ends up after the doors all
are taken off, burned into stardust dusting the air agitated
the last step so that it lasts and lasts as long as the forward thinker,
cheap beer drinker, sad autobiographies that go nowhere singer.
Paint peels off the walls in appetizing flakes that turn every room
the bare color of the barren-threshold.  The hallway always.  The walls.

    Art allows humanity one of its greatest ambitions: to test decisions and their repercussions without acting.  But therein lies the paradox: nothing can be undone, and no cause can be without effect.  Though there is little appreciable impact in an artistic move on the world around the artist, the world about — the individual zeitgeist — shudders at the act of creation.  This internal upheaval becomes the catalyst for which the result is a new moment of existence.  And yet this comes not of a decision, but is born of the one commandment sacred to the artist.

"A realm outside our understanding"
has come to mean the known universe
averaged with the potential for ignorance;
the way the body falls away from its own touch,
the way agoraphobia is exacerbated by flaying.

You are the convergence of asymptotes reaching
collapsed potentials, cold starts, almost,
the endless approaching each self-imposition.
With askance timing, a nervous babble of tired words.
An honest hand sticky with beer takes my rehearsed honesty,
hands me a cold one: cold sweats.
I take it as a handshake.

At a distance I gravitated to myself.
I made plagiarism self-referential,
a squishy analog for the precept of self.
I relived memories indiscriminately,
the way the body is outside understanding,
the way these lines converge with a touch.

Look, let's just fall (Acrostic)

Look, let's just fall and keep ragdolling down,
over and over just sound and the furious vain
outbursts of the wind like breaths against the inevitable
knowing: too soon, too intimately and closely the ground.

look let's just fall facing each other,

even our solipsism, with two eyes tired of looking out,

two brains scabbed from persistent introspection,

sees the same world differently in another.

just falling and holding myself open,
under me a growing concrete collage but I

Shut my eyes, spread out like dangling legs untied

to a crucifix, pretending to fly.

find me out against the sky,

an hour, four miles from where you jumped.
look, let's just fall, let's kick off our shoes,
look, let's waste our time like parachutes.